LENT CAN BE FUN

LENT CAN BE FUN.

Lent is something not many people practice today but if it is in religion,
we must ask ourselves why?

I believe it is a very good practice to follow because it purges your system of meat, dairy, alcohol and fat for 40 days.
Your body has a chance to rest and not fight toxins which continue to weaken the immune system.
I may be wrong but it sure does make a lot of sense and it costs you nothing to lose a little weight,
while strengthening your character, will power and thus…. your mind.

After 40 days, your taste buds sure do appreciate life and living and of course………FOOD!!!!

My Dad was a man of many talents. He loved to tinker.
One day he decided to design his own tent camper so we could go fishing.
He got the base frame from a car (junk yards were treasures in those days, you never knew what you’d find),
took out his welder, got a few pipes to weld. Then he sewed his own tent from canvas he got from somewhere and we girls
did the interior work putting in the mattresses and pillows to make it homey.
It was quite a project and maybe this is why I love doing projects today, which does my house a disfavor.
But….. I believe a house well lived in, is better than a show case home which looks more like a place you visit
rather than a home you love and enjoy being in, surrounded by…… stuff.(Maybe I should get out more loll.)
Anyway,
My Dad had a propane tank fitted for the outside of the trailer so we could cook inside when it rained and heat when it was wet and damp.
Once all was ready, off we went.

We had great days in that camper fishing in the Richelieu River, in Quebec, in a little town called Noyan, just by the US border.
I have many good memories from that river. Sometimes I feel like Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn, where that river is concerned.
It’s very historic in that it has two forts: Fort Lennox and Fort Montgomery.
Samuel de Champlain went up it and many battles took place with the Iroquois and sitting there,
one could almost feel those days as if they were yesterday.
Fort Lennox is on the Canadian side and they turned it into a tourist place where people are taken out by ferry boat.
Nice little island but when I was a kid, it was a place I’d love to drive to with my boat and run around on with my dog.
The river in those days was very clean. People used it for drinking water and the fish………….
well ……if you didn’t catch one or three on one line at the same time in a few minutes, you had to move on.

I’d do a lot of waterskiing and snorkeling in those days and was fascinated by the world under that strip of water.
We had everything. Perch, sunfish, rock fish, bass, pike, cat fish .
Once I met up with an eel face to face and we both got scared of each
other and high tailed it into different directions.
There was an old wooden bridge, we’d like to hang around to jump into the water from.
(They tore it down now and replaced it with a cement over pass, a little tooooooo high to jump off of today.)
Under it lived this huge old fish. It must have been one of the white fish people talked about.
It was about 5 feet long and if you teased it with a juicy worm on a hook, it was too smart to bite. It just lay there,
so we’d settle to come by every day and hang off the bridge looking at it.
This fish was killed in droves by people who wanted the pearl inside its’ head.
Unfortunately they would just throw the carcass away and the local people were not very happy about that.
We also had our own Loch Ness monster story.
We camped just at the mouth of Lake Champlain and this is where two fishermen disappeared.
After a thorough search, they found their boat broken in half under water but no people. Hmmm.
Since the Richelieu and Lake Champlain connected with the St Lawrence and the ocean, anything was possible.

Well, one day we went out to our camp site and found this jolly old French couple as our neghbors that weekend.
The man wore this hat full of different kind of fishing lures. He’d leave every morning around 4 am and by 8 am would return with 16 nice sized pike.
They were a really friendly couple but did not speak a word of English and my parents didn’t speak a word of French but they managed to communicate anyway.
My Dad was fascinated in how he managed to catch so many pike when at most we could only catch 4, with three fishing.
So the old man told him he’d take him with him the next day.
My Dad set the alarm to ring at 4 am but he didn’t need to cause being the fun guy that he was, the old man placed his boom box under our trailer on full blast and then turned it on.
It basically blasted us out of the trailer.
After having a good laugh at this heart failing joke, and waking up the whole campsite,
he and my Dad left and came back with some very nice pike.

So what does this story have to do with Lent??
Well, the reason we liked Pike was because my Dad would skin it and my Mom would put the meat through the grinder and do her culinary magic and stuff the meat back into the fish.
She’d sew on what needed to be sewn back on so it again looked like the majestic fish that it was when we caught it and then she’d bake it.
It would come out of the oven as proud in death as it was in life, with a wide open mouth, full of jagged teeth waiting for its prey.

When she would present it on the table, people would dishearten thinking: “ Oh darn, a bony fish to choke on.”
Then you would see their faces change in amazement as my mom gently cut the fish as she would a piece of cake.
All our visitors would suddenly become interested in knowing where she bought this fish with no bones and then we'd sit and talk fish for the rest of the meal.Loll

My parents were brats sometimes and they liked to tease people this way and it especially worked well with the priests in our church who we would invite a few times a year for dinner around the Lent period.
It made them feel so good not to have to fight with the food on their plate and made our family look good cause they thought we fasted for 40 days. lol